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Since its founding in Paris in 1854, Louis Vuitton has catered to—among the general throng of well-heeled everywomen—empresses, explorers, and magazine editors. What was once a tony little Parisian luggage shop is now the multifaceted jewel in the crown that sits atop the head of Bernard Arnault, CEO of the fashion conglomerate LVMH, who, in 2003, likened the revenue-generating house to a “luxury Microsoft.”[1] For well more than a century, Louis Vuitton was best known for the canvas-covered travel cases whose flat, stackable shapes were so suited to modern travel via planes, trains, and automobiles. The company’s operating system was substantially updated in 1997, however, when Marc Jacobs, the downtown New York designer best known at the time for elevating the grunge look, was hired as creative director. Jacobs was charged with creating not just apparel for Vuitton, but accessories, too (from handbags, to later on, watches and jewelry). Before long, the brand was not only moving with the times, it was shaping them. As Sally Singer colorfully reported in Vogue in 2000, “In the space of two years, and with much hoo-ha over his corporate teething pains, the darling of New York’s fashion antiestablishment has transformed an arch-bourgeois luggage company ravaged by a zillion knockoffs into an impossibly hip purveyor of haute ready-to-wear.”[2] Vuitton has indeed been devilled by copycats as early as the nineteenth century, but that imitation has often been the mother of invention. Production is controlled tightly—so that demand for handbags regularly exceeds supply, and prices are never reduced—but as soon as a new LV accessory is glimpsed in the press, the fakes and coattail-riders hit the production line . . . and so designers start thinking of something new. “My team and I are always playing ‘Top this’ with one another, hoping to surprise our customers,”[3] Jacobs told the magazine in 2010. “At Vuitton we’re working on this luggage icon, one with no archive of clothes,” he said in 2000. “It’s fun to keep bringing something fresh, and the way to do that is by bringing in fresh people.”[4] Among the creative collaborations, spearheaded by Jacobs, that have kept things constantly moving forward are those with the 1980s It designer Stephen Sprouse and the artists Richard Prince and Takashi Murakami. The pop-meets-manga efforts of Murakami were so unique—some of the bags requiring up to 93 color screens (versus the three needed for the basic LV logo)—that the house altered its Monogram Canvas for the first time since its introduction in 1896. Just as art-world A-listers have been brought in to the design atelier, a troupe of Hollywood stars (Jennifer Lopez, Uma Thurman, Scarlett Johansson) have been tapped by Jacobs to represent the company in its advertisements, and world-renowned architects hired to dream up new retail spaces. Jacobs’s out-of-the-box thinking has stoked unflagging interest in the brand